Rank Ranger Blog

The wonderfully wonderful Jenny Halasz chats it up about Google’s ability to offer nuanced results on the SERP:

• Is Google living up to the hype? Does it consistently offer clear and nuanced results?
• How’s that whole BERT thing working out at this point?
• Where are the gaps in Google’s interpretation skills and what does that mean for your site?

Plus, we breakdown how Google uses its entity understanding and Story expansions for pure marketing genius!

Google's removal of the URL that appears within its Featured Snippets from the page one organic results has thrown the SEO world into a bit of tizzy. As things begin to settle down, one of the questions we have to deal with is how to consider Featured Snippet URLs when tracking our ranking progress. With only one instance of the URL on page one of the SERP many are now considering Featured Snippets as the new position 1. But tracking rank with Featured Snippets as the #1 organic result presents its own problems. 

Learn how to track rank with Featured Snippets as position 1 and how you can identify when a top-ranking result is a Featured Snippet vs. an organic result.

It did not take long for Google to release its first confirmed core algorithm update of 2020. Just two weeks into the new year, Google announced the release of what it has called the January 2020 Core Update. Right from the get-go, all signs pointed to this update being on the larger and more impactful side. Here is a look at the update's overall impact on rank stability, a per niche rank volatility analysis, and a comparison in scope and size to a recent unconfirmed update.

In other words.... How big was the January 2020 Core Update and who did it impact the most?

Cori Graft of Seer Interactive joins the show to talk about how to analyze the competitive field at the local level:

• What metrics should you focus on when analyzing the local competition?
• How to find, analyze, and track local competitors at scale!
• What going beyond proximity means for your local competition analysis! 

Plus, we have the data! Jump into the data on the recent Jan 2020 Core Update!

If you’ve logged on to any social media account recently, chances are you’ve seen confirmation bias in effect. Confirmation bias is everywhere nowadays though you may not always see its effects directly. As confirmation bias is often not easily observed, it can cloud our marketing decisions and cause us to treat our potential clients poorly. Keeping confirmation bias at the forefront of our decision-making processes is critical to being both an effective and ethical marketer.

Big time guest with us as The Women In Search SEO Series continues with the one and only Dawn Anderson who gets into everything BERT and SEO:

• Clear & understandable details on how the heck BERT actually works
• The real story on how BERT’s implications will hit SEO
• What better contextual conceptualization means for content

Plus, we take a look at how the very fabric of the SERP might be changing!

It's 2020 and what better way to kick off the new year than by looking back at the December 2019 SERP! Don't think for a second that Google took it easy as 2019 wound down.... The last month of the year saw Google take BERT international and use the natural language processing (NLP) technique to take the Top Stories feature to places no news carousel has gone before. Couple that with an onslaught of local changes to the SERP and you have yourself a mighty month of SERP madness!

And away we go!

It’s 2020 y’all and we’re kicking it off with a living legend. Jennifer Slegg chats it up with us about the Quality Raters Guidelines!

• Why Google has changed its language around YMYL
• The meaning of Google shuffling around its categorization of YMYL sites
• The ever-controversial relationship between the Quality Raters Guidelines and Google’s algorithm

Plus, we jump into the crap people are saying about doing SEO in 2020!

From the nuances of E-A-T to when you should consider SEO automation to Fraggles to having a diverse professional background when doing SEO... these are our top 10 moments on The In Search SEO Podcast in 2019!

The best part of my job is the ability to spend time pondering, analyzing, and researching anything and everything within the world of Search. It's in these moments where I feel I'm making a difference by helping advance the SEO conversation. With this sentimentality, let's have a look back on 2019 and revisit some of the insights we've uncovered here at Rank Ranger over the year.

This week we talk about being discoverable with the CEO of Directive Consulting, Garrett Mehrguth!

• How to be discoverable by gobbling up as much market share as possible
• Taking advantage of review sites for discoverability
• Where Search fits into the discoverability picture

Plus, we take a look at the impact of the holiday season on the presence of PLAs on the SERP!

Every year we say the same thing and this year is no different... 2019 was one for the ages here at Rank Ranger with scores of new innovative SEO insights hitting the platform over the course of the year! 2019 wasn't only special to us due to the depth of SEO reporting we brought to the market but for the series of new free SEO tools we developed so as to offer anyone and everyone access to great SEO insights.

What do you say we skip the small talk and head right to the new SEO data, reports, and tools we brought to you in 2019?!